I have been thinking (and it's a very rough idea at the moment) of bringing back the Environmental Encapsulation tech but using it differently, with it you can colonise any world, including a Hostile world, but have a max population very small, one or two. Then you terraform it and it slowly becomes more habitable so teh population can move out of the domes and start expanding.

That would be for a player that decides to go down the terraforming route.

For a player that likes the adaptation route, you basically keep the xenological techs and cyborgs roughly as is, probably tweaking the numbers in some way and possibly adding another tech or two.

What I haven't figured out is how to make those directions a choice, either on a per-empire or per-species level.

Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

MatGB wrote:I have been thinking (and it's a very rough idea at the moment) of bringing back the Environmental Encapsulation tech but using it differently, with it you can colonise any world, including a Hostile world, but have a max population very small, one or two. Then you terraform it and it slowly becomes more habitable so teh population can move out of the domes and start expanding.

That would be for a player that decides to go down the terraforming route.

For a player that likes the adaptation route, you basically keep the xenological techs and cyborgs roughly as is, probably tweaking the numbers in some way and possibly adding another tech or two.

What I haven't figured out is how to make those directions a choice, either on a per-empire or per-species level.

Perhaps, a couple levels of Environmental encapsulation... to let you live farther and farther from adequate.

Then the issue is getting the max pop on those worlds.

The way things seem..
Terraforming changes the world to a specific type, so it shouldn't work for species of different environments
Terraforming seems like something that should be expensive, and you would need to pay for on a world by world basis

Xenoadaptation changes the species...either to be more tolerant of the environment they are in or of all environments
...
for maximum choice I would suggest the second.

Essentially Xenoadaptation would act to broaden the species "good" EPs.

I could see Xenoadaptation requiring influence. (persuading people to get changed to cyborgs)

so something like
Environmental Encapsulation 1, 2, 3+..enables you to colonize a world with max pop 1 that is 1, 2, or 3+ steps away from where you can colonize normally

Xenoadaptation project 1-4.. cost (influence)= (species population in your empire+base amount) x distance factor [only applicable for a species you actually have].. makes that species view worlds of distance 1-4 as good.
bonuses-instantly applicable to new worlds
penalty-wasted for pop on worlds that are already good

Terraforming buildings 1-4.. cost (production) = world size factor x distance factor... only applicable on worlds currently viewed by the current species as "non good"... will instantly change the EP to your desired one when finished (building persists.. if destroyed the EP reverts)
[longer distances have more minimum turns]

That way there is a reason to choose between them in terms of cost (influence v. production) and effect (species by species or world by world)

By getting Xenoadaptation for a species at the Imperial level, you would prevent Terraforming.

Then perhaps some way to "select outposts/colonies that Can have Terraforming building X" (can have and aren't building already, and just add it to them)

@spikethe hobbit
I agree I swapped the meaning of adaption and terraforming.

I'm not suggesting different colonizers for different environments.

I'll try to clarify below.

There are three categories of effects:

increasing population in environments you can already colonize

increasing population in environments you can not yet colonize

making new environments colonizable.

Currently, terraforming does A. and adaption does A., B. and C.

Adaption is a significant contributor to the explosive resource growth of the empires in the mid game. As empires grow they see a geometrically increasing number of planets. Adaption grows the population cap on all of those planets linearly. Hence explosion.

To limit the growth and present a clearer choice, one tech line should do A. and one tech line should do C. No tech line should do B.

Category A techs only increases population limits on planets already colonizable.

For category C tech I suggest a set of four buildings. Each of the buildings makes the environment look 1 to 4 steps better for all species. So if you build the category C level four building on an outpost/colony then that planet's environment looks "good" for all species in the game. If you have researched the tech, you only need to build the level four building not one, two and three leading up to it.

The two different lines of technology present an interesting choice. Empires that pursue category A tech will have a smaller number of higher population colonies. Empire following the category C technology line will have a larger number of colonies with smaller populations.

On the category C technology line, you need to choose, whether to research all the way and then only build the level four buildings and colonize everywhere, or more likely just research far enough to give you an advantage in geography(galactography?) over other empires.

LGM-Doyle wrote:@spikethe hobbit
I agree I swapped the meaning of adaption and terraforming.

I'm not suggesting different colonizers for different environments.

I'll try to clarify below.

There are three categories of effects:

increasing population in environments you can already colonize

increasing population in environments you can not yet colonize

making new environments colonizable.

Currently, terraforming does A. and adaption does A., B. and C.

Adaption is a significant contributor to the explosive resource growth of the empires in the mid game. As empires grow they see a geometrically increasing number of planets. Adaption grows the population cap on all of those planets linearly. Hence explosion.

To limit the growth and present a clearer choice, one tech line should do A. and one tech line should do C. No tech line should do B.

Category A techs only increases population limits on planets already colonizable.

For category C tech I suggest a set of four buildings. Each of the buildings makes the environment look 1 to 4 steps better for all species. So if you build the category C level four building on an outpost/colony then that planet's environment looks "good" for all species in the game. If you have researched the tech, you only need to build the level four building not one, two and three leading up to it.

The two different lines of technology present an interesting choice. Empires that pursue category A tech will have a smaller number of higher population colonies. Empire following the category C technology line will have a larger number of colonies with smaller populations.

On the category C technology line, you need to choose, whether to research all the way and then only build the level four buildings and colonize everywhere, or more likely just research far enough to give you an advantage in geography(galactography?) over other empires.

The problem with that is there isn't really a choice...you want to do both.
(Unless the main method of choosing is very expensive research costs....which would be reasonable)

Alternatively, there's no reason that bonuses that are population dependent need to be just simply linearly dependent on population. A simple way to start would be to make bonuses linear up to a cap, after which additional population gives no benefit.

@LGM-Doyle I do repeat-build terraform, but I'm always missing planets or queuing the wrong number. I'm on Linux, too, so the UI is horrifically slow (~7-10 fps) and GG is erratic at that speed, so I try to keep mouse movements to a minimum.

@Geoff that would nerf large and huge worlds too much.

I have been thinking about a general-purpose autobuild menu. That would solve micromanagement for terraforming, gaiaform, and drydock. With tweaking it could handle GGG, too.

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@Geoff If you want to go that route, I can see scaling back benefits past a certain point, but a hard cutoff means huge and large planets are equivalent. The other (simpler) way is to change the population caps of larger planets. This would have the same effect.

All contributions are submitted under GPL or LGPL v2 or later, or under appropriate Creative Commons licence, consistent with project guidlines.

At some point (post Influence) we're going to do a complete balance pass on all the bonuses that're population dependent anyway, I suspect within that we'll look at the population bonuses themselves as well, currently it's possible to get stupid-huge populations and stupid-huge population based bonuses.

Having cutoffs for some bonuses, or changing what they're trigger from, is definitely worth considering.

Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

MatGB wrote:At some point (post Influence) we're going to do a complete balance pass on all the bonuses that're population dependent anyway

This. And as that's (hopefully) going to happen next release cycle, I think we better postpone any major reworking/rebalancing of pop/resource boni after that's done (as the whole influence thing is going to change balance and dynamics drastically). I expect squeezing in some bigger work on those boni before the influence thing to be a huge waste of time and effort, as most of that would have to be redone again afterwards...